Comment by zahlman

Then why are people constantly talking about how expensive it is now to get a new computer with 64GB of RAM and several TB of flash storage and a modern graphics card?

Why would they remotely need any of that, if "to a first approximation no one wants desktop software"?

> when I can spend $20/month and codex is included with my ChatGPT subscription?

I bought the machine I'm posting from for about $1k (with some minor upgrades since then). Canadian. More than 11 years ago. And that gets me the entire computer rather than one specific cloud service.

$20/month is a lot, actually.

Even comparing to a new computer (which there is apparently still a lot of demand for): monthly charges really should be compared to a couple decades of principal, the amount you'd have to save up to yield that cash flow as a return on investment (or just interest). But even just a year or two of $20/month is hundreds of dollars. That's not insignificant, when the opportunity cost is reckoned in terms of physical goods that perform general computation.